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Paper short abstract

This paper examines resistance to a mining project in Covas do Barroso, showing how the threat of extractivism catalyses territorial reclamation as re-existence. Through everyday practices, inhabitants enact relational worlds, unsettling dominant views of territory and belonging in rural Europe.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines a process of territorial (re)claiming in Covas do Barroso, a rural mountainous village in northern Portugal, in the context of sustained local resistance to a prospective lithium mining project since 2017. Drawing on yearlong ethnographic fieldwork and my collaborative engagement with this place-based struggle since 2021, it focuses on how the anticipation of extractivism became politically and ontologically generative. It argues that the threat of extractivism catalysed territorial reclamation as a form of re-existence (Porto-Gonçalves 2006). Grounded in a political ontology framework, this paper examines the practices mediating inhabitants’ relations with their mountains and their diverse lifeforms, revealing that these practices enact a lifeworld in which mountains are not external landscapes but active agents provoking politics. Such relations resonate closely with relational modes of being, suggesting that ontological difference is not exclusive to explicitly non-European Indigenous contexts. Fundamentally, the imminent threat of mining has made these enactments particularly visible, transforming taken-for-granted ways of life into conscious stances of defence. Inhabitants increasingly define themselves as guardians of an affective territory sustained across generations and recognised as World Agricultural Heritage. In this sense, extractivism operates not only as environmental and economic disruption but also as a catalyst for the politicisation of lived relations – in what I term a process of re-existence. By opening up Northern multiplicities, this paper moves beyond the “West and the Rest” divide, showing how mountain territorial reclaims in rural Europe unsettle dominant assumptions about indigeneity, autochthony, and belonging.